You were born to love. But what does that mean in everyday life? Well, love is a body thing, not just an idea or an emotion. Looking at a three-year-old dancing, maybe your heart “opened,” and you felt the warmth of love. In a moment of prayer, or in a time of great pain, did a friend take your hand, your heart opened, and you felt love?

How to find the body-feeling of love

One powerful woman I know lives a moment-by-moment life of gratitude and love. As part of daily life, she imagines being in a cocoon of love as she sends a strand of connection from her heart to the heart of another, whom she also surrounds with a cocoon of love.

Such powerful imagery can unlock the door to feeling love. Yet more than imagery is involved here. The mind alone cannot fully grasp love. Oh, we can have an idea or an image, of what we think love is, but it’s more than that. Love is a body feeling -- a visceral feeling that rises up within us. There’s no striving or effort. We simply wait for love to flow in. Genuine gratitude is a grand way to prime.the pump of love.

For this to happen, however, there are a few prerequisites.We must first love ourselves.We can’t give away what we don’t have. To love others, we must first be unconditional in the acceptance and love of ourselves. Only then we can move on to love others. Also, in the moment we must feel safe enough to relax and let go of any constriction in our body so that our hearts can open to accept the inflow of love.

When people have no interest in authentic love, we can still feel love for them. First, however, we must let go of the need to avoid or control them. Instead, seeing them as our teachers, we release them––let them go. Also, we do not have to keep interacting with them. For our own good, however, we can choose to forgive them and keep our heart open to love.

Typing, swimming, and playing golf are skills learned through experience and repetition. The more we do them correctly, the better we become at those skills. Loving is also a learned skill. Choice-by-choice, we train both our mind and body to stay open to the experience of sharing love, changing our lives forever!